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Reene
Aug 26, 2005

:justpost:

Obligatum VII posted:

Didn't the abyss stop being anti-reality in 2E and instead transitioned to being simply a collection of incompatible ones with the lower depths moving in to fill the all consuming negaverse spot?

In many ways it was also that in 1E. At least, several of the supplemental materials about the Abyss (including Imperial Mysteries) pointed that way. Lower Depths existed in 1E and was tied to the Abyss in strange ways in a few places. Parts of it bled into the Underworld too, and there are some strange implications made in the Underworld splat for Geist.

Also re: other gamelines not getting Archmage-level stuff, it says right there in Imperial Mysteries that other major supernaturals do have those things, just (as mentioned) nobody actually wrote a book for them. But everything from Prometheans to Vampires have terrifyingly powerful members or benefactors that will explicitly gently caress up any Archmage that tries to mess with them or how they work, to the point that trying is a violation of the Pax and will bring every other Archmage down on your head.

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Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Archonex posted:

The Exarch's aren't really in control of anything any more than anyone else is though unless you want to give Mage primacy over every other setting. There's a whole bunch of implied (and a few outright) stated caveats to their power listed across all the books. Of course if you want to make them the ultimate big bad then that's entirely doable given the toolkit nature of the NWoD/CofD. It just removes every other line from the equation at that level of power and begs the question of how the other supernatural beings continue to exist if there aren't other tier 4's that are cock blocking mages from going on an extermination spree.

Yeah, I'm not really interested in who can murk who (unless it becomes relevant to a campaign :v: ) I'm interested in common mechanics and principles; in whether the same type of energy is manipulated by Obrimos, Qashmallim, and the God-Machine, or the life-cycle of an Idigam like I mentioned earlier, or what force makes Changeling contracts and Soul Pacts enforceable under such a specific set of rules.

I want to be able to look at problems or powers accessible to one splat and easily be able to translate that to "what would this look like to a werewolf?" because the perspective is different but the underlying framework is similar enough that that's not a nonsensical question.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
Did the rules/systems in Requiem for Rome ever get converted to 2E anywhere?

Archonex
May 2, 2012

MY OPINION IS SEERS OF THE THRONE PROPAGANDA IGNORE MY GNOSIS-IMPAIRED RAMBLINGS
Good god that post about Drac was loving long.

I didn't even get into the fact that one suggested origin for the Unholy is implied to be what happens when multiple Strix get stuffed into a human host. Which given the nature of the Strix probably contributed a bit to her unwillingly leaving a trail of devastation and chaos in her wake prior to her just giving up and going with being a monster.

Fun fact though: Chronologically, from what's been released so far about the Unholy her being one of Dracula's brides is the last time mentioned that she tries to act human. And given what she does to one of the vampires (Who is basically a :black101: bruiser that's taken to calling himself himself Count Motherfucking Dracula since he's the last/only male heir to Drac's line.) she embraced it'd probably be safe for a GM exploring that bit of history to say that the point where the original Dracula figured out what the other brides really were after was the moment she gave up when it came to her desperately trying to not be a godawful monster.

Suffice to say that Dracula's story ties into a whole bunch of other plot arcs and is basically dysfunction_junction.txt.


Tuxedo Catfish posted:

Yeah, I'm not really interested in who can murk who (unless it becomes relevant to a campaign :v: ) I'm interested in common mechanics and principles; in whether the same type of energy is manipulated by Obrimos, Qashmallim, and the God-Machine, or the life-cycle of an Idigam like I mentioned earlier, or what force makes Changeling contracts and Soul Pacts enforceable under such a specific set of rules.

I want to be able to look at problems or powers accessible to one splat and easily be able to translate that to "what would this look like to a werewolf?" because the perspective is different but the underlying framework is similar enough that that's not a nonsensical question.

That's a fair point. It's gonna be a long and probably rambling post due to me being tired but in 1e Mage at least I always figured that the supernal was just a highly conceptualized look at the setting. My take on it:

Basically my assumed take on all the different energies like essence, vitae, mana, etc, etc was to look at it in the context of the OWoD and Exalted during the period of time it was linked to it. There's a lot of crossover in the terminology those settings have with the NWoD. It even extends a bit into how those terms are used. Given that the stuff that ghosts, spirits, werewolves, and some humans in the NWoD use (Called essence for those character types. A term also used by mages in the OWoD and the Exalted in Exalted as a catch all term to describe the metaphysical "stuff" of reality. Also something those character types could use in those settings.) is probably just the physical and refined form of the energies that make up the world.

Some supernaturals like werewolves, ghosts, etc, etc, have an instinctual ability to dicker about with it. Or in the case of gifts they can be taught a way to do it. Heck, werewolves even have some terminology ripped straight from the pages of the OWoD and Exalted, just they occasionally get the meaning of the word backwards compared to the other WoD related settings.

Given that it's possible for vampires to be the result of ghosts/souls being messed with or pissy hybridized spirits from the lower depths (Which also use essence.) then vitae is probably a solidified/physical form of essence that can be seen and touched that also has some corruptive properties that helps keep a person "alive". And everyone's got a bit of essence in them too. You can feed spirits with it via blood if you don't produce resonance via living emotions any more and mages are even mentioned as being able to recharge mana via a blood sacrifice.

Essence (and by extension quintessence) itself is just the stuff that makes up reality, much like how it was in both OWoD and Exalted. If you know how to work with it, either subconsciously or through actively studying the world you can do some really crazy stuff. The supernal and it's related energies and realms are what you get when you try to look at the world and it's make up of those energies on a mystically macro scale. Hence why mages have to work more to use their powers compared to most supernatural beings. They're basically doing it the hard way, with the benefit that they can pull off some truly crazy stuff in a fraction of the time others do if they can figure out how to manipulate the energies that make up reality.

As for why it's all named differently? Well, just like in previous WW settings there's little permutations on those energies and how they show up depending on what part of existence it's from from and how a given supernatural interacts with it. And the CofD is filled with more paranoid people than an actual game of Paranoia when it comes to keeping secrets. So good look comparing notes on all the weird occult powers people seem to have. Even when it happens someone else is liable to eventually kill the other people sharing secrets to cover his own rear end or take them all for himself.

As for how it'd translate in character though? I'd imagine most mages would panic if they realized that a vampire was capable of altering the world to the degree they were potentially able to do. Since they think they have a monopoly on seemingly magical effects at that level and that would be one hell of a shocker.

So a mage might freak the gently caress out if an ancient vampire were to --- say, start altering the world and inhabitants around a city for his amusement. Which at least one vampire of extreme age can in fact do. He just took a hell of a long time to get to that point since he wasn't having his understanding of how the world worked be super-charged by having had a journey into some mystical non-material realm.

The few "epic" tier devotions in 1e were downright arch mage-like in their potency too. And probably a bit more broken due to how easily they could be spammed. Zagreus could literally just puppeteer an entire civilization or provoke the downfall of any given character in a setting with a few spoken words, for instance.

Regardless, the end result though is that the absolute end of the power scale everyone's capable of some pretty crazy stuff. They just go about it in different ways.


Edit: Also, here's the intro text to the devotion I mentioned. It shows off what I mean about non-mage supernatural beings being just as ridiculous at the upper end of power.

quote:

Blood Potency: 9 Dominate 5 Majesty 4 Costs: 3 Vitae

Sometimes Zagreus likes to have a challenge. He expends effort to put things in motion: he makes promises, brokers deals, dangles the carrot or lashes out with the stick. Truth is, though, his seemingly endless Requiem has left him more than a little lazy. Complacency is king, here, and with this Devotion, Zagreus needn’t put forth all that pesky effort. With his potent tongue, he merely needs to demand what will happen—and the world will conspire to make it happen.

There's no roll to defend against it. The only thing you can do is try to prevent whatever he says will happen via interfering at a few key crisis points. Also, he can't specify a time frame for an event occurring. So there's no predicting when you'll need to be on guard against the proclaimed event. Also, also, he has no cap on how many times he can use that aside from him needing to have 3 vitae on hand. So he can just keep spamming calamities and tragedies at things he doesn't like and eventually something will take them out.

There's no way a mage wouldn't look at that and not think that wasn't linked to supernal magic. He's literally altering the world to his whim.

Archonex fucked around with this message at 08:36 on Mar 6, 2017

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

GG!*
*GET GOOD
How large do God Machine plans get/how much do Demons remember about the job they where doing when they fell?

I like the idea of a Saboteur Psychopomp that's continually having to go back and monkey wrench infrastructure to keep the plan that they used to be tasked to from going off, otherwise Bad Stuff happens.

Trouble is, I dunno how much Bad Stuff is tonally appropriate (Some people die? A city is destroyed? The God Machine has a Planet Cracker it can use to delete humanity if it decides that's a good option?) and whether the above scenario is even possible, considering that Falling apparently glitches the God Machine in small ways. Does an Angel falling and becoming a Demon make the God Machine forget that the Angel ever existed, and abandon the project they where working on, or is another Angel created and slotted into place when the original is found missing?

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Crasical posted:

How large do God Machine plans get/how much do Demons remember about the job they where doing when they fell?

The Demon Storyteller's Guide has fiction about a pair of Angels / sentient Infrastructure that span entire galaxies, so, in short, the answer is "really fuckin' big."

As for Demon memory, the overall sense I get is that Demons remember everything, but it's more a question of what they knew in the first place. An Angel doesn't generally know why it's doing what it's doing, and depending on the complexity of the task assigned to it and how much autonomy it was given in the first place, it might even lack significant details necessary to completing its task right up until the moment it needs them.

Like, think of all the things you don't have memorized because you know you can always look them up, then imagine that you could do that lookup process instantly just by thinking about it, and then imagine that ability was suddenly ripped out of your skull and you were thrown naked into the Amazon rainforest.

Crasical posted:

I like the idea of a Saboteur Psychopomp that's continually having to go back and monkey wrench infrastructure to keep the plan that they used to be tasked to from going off, otherwise Bad Stuff happens.

Trouble is, I dunno how much Bad Stuff is tonally appropriate (Some people die? A city is destroyed? The God Machine has a Planet Cracker it can use to delete humanity if it decides that's a good option?) and whether the above scenario is even possible, considering that Falling apparently glitches the God Machine in small ways. Does an Angel falling and becoming a Demon make the God Machine forget that the Angel ever existed, and abandon the project they where working on, or is another Angel created and slotted into place when the original is found missing?

How much Bad Stuff: keep in mind that, for whatever reason, the God Machine is generally invested in the status quo. It doesn't want to deal with catastrophic, world-ending disasters, it wants human beings to keep their heads down and not pay too much attention, and its interest in Demons is a combination of wanting the resources that went into their creation back / eliminating them as threats to its plans / secretly manipulating them even though they're fallen in order to create more elaborate Infrastructure or Output.

If a piece of Infrastructure breaks down, some ideas for negative consequences: Angels come sniffing around to investigate why it isn't working, putting any local Demons at risk; maybe the Infrastructure starts constantly producing some kind of output which is toxic or dangerous or alive; maybe it's designed to eliminate waste or convert raw material, in which case maybe the cultists or sub-Angel automata that man the Infrastructure start feeding it everything that matches the description, whether that's sunlight or lost toys or people; maybe whatever it produces is both dangerous and valuable and if it seems to be abandoned someone else will muscle in and try to claim it for themselves.

A lot of your other questions depend on the state of local Infrastructure. If the God Machine is really strongly established in an area, it will notice more and respond quicker. Other areas are dead zones where Demons or other entities have effectively forced it out, in which case its surveillance and ability to transport Angels or otherwise forcefully affect the area will be pretty limited. The God Machine might have Infrastructure that logs Descents, but the greater edifice isn't aware of that information until it's sent on somehow. Maybe you have a grace period. The mechanics of Cover suggests that the Fall at the very least obscures some of the information about the newly minted Demon (otherwise their starting Cover would come pre-compromised) but the fiction also suggests that they're frequently hunted from the moment they Fall.

Archonex
May 2, 2012

MY OPINION IS SEERS OF THE THRONE PROPAGANDA IGNORE MY GNOSIS-IMPAIRED RAMBLINGS

Reene posted:

Also re: other gamelines not getting Archmage-level stuff, it says right there in Imperial Mysteries that other major supernaturals do have those things, just (as mentioned) nobody actually wrote a book for them. But everything from Prometheans to Vampires have terrifyingly powerful members or benefactors that will explicitly gently caress up any Archmage that tries to mess with them or how they work, to the point that trying is a violation of the Pax and will bring every other Archmage down on your head.

Yeah, I forgot to mention that in my :words: posts. The other supernatural beings accordant with each game line are implied to be downright godlike, to the point that arch mages consider them worth bargaining with for a tidbit of quintessence to work a spell and loving with a supernatural group on a species wide/unilateral level is considered right off the table.

Though, that may be getting touched on again soon. One of the new VTR books deals with elders and ancients and the write up for it mentions that some of the powers are apparently going to be a look at epic devotions and disciplines.

Maybe they'll toss a few tidbits in that go beyond talking about elders and ancients and look at what goes on at the tier 4 level for vampires. Since the book's about playing and storytelling an elder it probably won't go that far, but still. It's probably as close as we're ever going to get.

Archonex fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Mar 6, 2017

Rubix Squid
Apr 17, 2014
How much a demon remembers about their fall and the operations they were taking part in is largely left up to the player and ST. It can range from total amnesia or missing key details to having a fairly detailed account of their previous mission, though they're unlikely to remember anything prior to that mission.

I would say that the local infrastructure forgets the demon as they fall. It's either corrupted by glitches created by the fall itself or the descent rips it out wholesale. Of course the larger system of the God-Machine has backups and archives so it will realize that there's a gap soon enough. In the event something has managed to get rid of even those it could use it's ample ability to gently caress with time to fill in those holes if it considered the demon pesky enough.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

GG!*
*GET GOOD
Thanks, Tuxedo catfish.

I was more questioning how much Bad Stuff leaving infrastructure STANDING can cause, what the Output of a large working with multiple stages of Infrastructure building atop each other for an end goal could be.

I'm currently thinking in the terms of the most recent X-Com game, where the aliens have a secret project that you continually need to be working to set back, and it's game over if ever completed. Smashing the whole project in one go is impossible, it's a game of delaying, destroying, and sabotaging the aliens as a resistance group to extend your timer and give you more time to complete all your other goals.

You make some good points about the God Machine being invested more in perpetuating the status quo rather than drastic change, which does make things a little tricky, as it removes a lot of big obvious 'kaboom!' type 'And you want to stop that' effects.

"You must struggle and sabotage your eternal enemy, or... very little will obviously happen!"

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
Ah, right, I misread you a bit. A Demon isn't necessarily going to be as invested in the fate and freedom of the human race as an X-Com operative is, but if they are, the threat is also potentially pretty similar: the God Machine prefers humans being to be docile, unimaginative, and easily manipulated, and its ultimate designs for them might leave them less than what we'd think of as human. Maybe the Infrastructure is a test run for some kind of mind control or biomechanical tampering, only affecting the local area but making people drowsy and suggestible, unalarmed by the overt growth of further infrastructure or Angelic manifestations, and ultimately turning them into mindless drones. An altruistic Saboteur would probably want to stop this from happening both on its face and to prove the experiment too costly to reproduce.

Alternatively, stuff that isn't a threat to humanity can still be a huge threat to Demons. Infrastructure could be designed to poison them, detect them, starve them off from resources, dampen their abilities. One of the examples the book gives is a facility that produces supposedly "safer" Tasers with a lower rate of inducing of heart attacks and other serious injuries. And they really are safer... for human beings. They also deal lethal or aggravated damage to Demons.

Dave Brookshaw
Jun 27, 2012

No Regrets

xanthan posted:

Father Wolf is an awakened wolf. :colbert:

God could you imagine if they went with that for an explanation?

We went with an entirely different explanation.

Father Wolf wasn't a god-Rank spirit, he was a god-Rank Pangaen, a now-extinct type of being from the Bordermarches, the world that collapsed and became the Gauntlet when he died.

Amusingly for the tone of this conversation, Pangaens are the only thing other than mages and Supernal entities to have Supernal magic / Arcana ratings.

Archonex
May 2, 2012

MY OPINION IS SEERS OF THE THRONE PROPAGANDA IGNORE MY GNOSIS-IMPAIRED RAMBLINGS

Dave Brookshaw posted:

We went with an entirely different explanation.

Father Wolf wasn't a god-Rank spirit, he was a god-Rank Pangaen, a now-extinct type of being from the Bordermarches, the world that collapsed and became the Gauntlet when he died.

Amusingly for the tone of this conversation, Pangaens are the only thing other than mages and Supernal entities to have Supernal magic / Arcana ratings.

Oh hey, that's neat. Which book's that in?

I guess it kind of blows my nerdy theory about how all the different types of energies are linked together out of the water too. I didn't even know Father Wolf had access to supernal magic.

Archonex fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Mar 6, 2017

The Unlife Aquatic
Jun 17, 2009

Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It's the only way to live
In cars

Dave Brookshaw posted:

We went with an entirely different explanation.

Father Wolf wasn't a god-Rank spirit, he was a god-Rank Pangaen, a now-extinct type of being from the Bordermarches, the world that collapsed and became the Gauntlet when he died.

Amusingly for the tone of this conversation, Pangaens are the only thing other than mages and Supernal entities to have Supernal magic / Arcana ratings.

Oh, the bordermarches, aren't those near the Mirror-Marches of Irem?

DigitalRaven
Oct 9, 2012




Archonex posted:

Oh hey, that's neat. Which book's that in?

I guess it kind of blows my nerdy theory about how all the different types of energies are linked together out of the water too. I didn't even know Father Wolf had access to supernal magic.

It's in Dark Eras. Dave blogged about it more here

Archonex
May 2, 2012

MY OPINION IS SEERS OF THE THRONE PROPAGANDA IGNORE MY GNOSIS-IMPAIRED RAMBLINGS

Oh poo poo. Figures it's the one book I don't have or can't bum off of friends for a bit.

How are the Vampire and Mage parts of that book? They looked pretty neat from what I heard about them. At the very least if they ended up adding a bit more to the setting I could probably get some use out if it at some point if I pick it up.


Edit: Oh hey, that's the book with the Weihan Cynn (How the gently caress do you even pronounce that? :stonk:). Guess i'll have to pick it up at some point after all.

Archonex fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Mar 6, 2017

DigitalRaven
Oct 9, 2012




If you're interested, it's also available as a single chapter. Even cheaper than usual because of the GM's Day sale thing.

Archonex
May 2, 2012

MY OPINION IS SEERS OF THE THRONE PROPAGANDA IGNORE MY GNOSIS-IMPAIRED RAMBLINGS

DigitalRaven posted:

If you're interested, it's also available as a single chapter. Even cheaper than usual because of the GM's Day sale thing.

Oh wow. Well there goes $2.79 I guess. Thanks for the heads up!

Axelgear
Oct 13, 2011

If I'm wrong, please don't hesitate to tell me. It happens pretty often and I will try to change my opinion if I'm presented with evidence.

Crasical posted:

I like the idea of a Saboteur Psychopomp that's continually having to go back and monkey wrench infrastructure to keep the plan that they used to be tasked to from going off, otherwise Bad Stuff happens.

Trouble is, I dunno how much Bad Stuff is tonally appropriate (Some people die? A city is destroyed? The God Machine has a Planet Cracker it can use to delete humanity if it decides that's a good option?) and whether the above scenario is even possible, considering that Falling apparently glitches the God Machine in small ways.

One of the example scenarios in the CofD core has the GM mass-murdering humanity by disease and sterility because humans had dug enough uranium for it. It is one of my genuine favourite scenarios.

In more direct answer to your question, maybe take some inspiration from cell biology.

The plans of the God Machine often look like positive feedback loops; that is, scenarios where every action is designed to further the Big Plan until some external force - completion or antagonism - shuts it down.

In nature, though, way more systems are negative feedback loops that regulate a system to ensure that it dynamically returns to equilibrium or halts progress of a process until some stimulus breaks the equilibrium.

Consider two angels in perfect harmony over a doomsday device that will annihilate Kentucky. Every day at a predestined time or times, one sends one signal to a sleeping doom machine that tells it to wake up and the other sends it a matching signal to stay asleep; the signals balance and doombot slumbers. Except, one day, due to orders from the GM or outside interference, sleepbot gets deactivated or killed or reassigned or is otherwise unable to push its button.

Wakebot is left standing there; staring at the emptiness left behind when sleepbot went away and feeling... Uncertain. A rising sensation it may later come to know as anxiety as, each day, there's more movement and bubbles rising from the mostly opaque, scintilating waters filling the pool they watch over. Uncertainty, anxiety, fear, maybe even concern for meatbags rise.

Until, at last, wakebot pulls itself free from the infrastructure, crosses to sleepbot's panel, and starts to silence doombot. The act causes them to Fall, but no angels come to destroy them (right away). So each day, the Demon wanders down into that underground room, presses a button, and saves Kentucky for another day. Wondering if or when the systems might notice the time has come for doombot to wake.

Basic Chunnel
Sep 21, 2010

Jesus! Jesus Christ! Say his name! Jesus! Jesus! Come down now!

One of the things about Demon is that derailing the God Machine's plans is always a vanishingly simple (though never easy) task. It's as simple as moving a piece of the matrix just out of place to break the circuit at a critical juncture. The trick is usually figuring out what the important bits are so you can tweak the GM's OCD.

That said, the books make it seem pretty unlikely that you would have to break the same infrastructure continually. Keeping it running might involve continuous obligation and risk. But an occult matrix has very exacting demands in time and materials and circumstance, and there's only one chance to get it right. If you scuttle a matrix in any way, its infrastructure becomes useless and goes on the GM's recycling list (though demons, usually the ones that kill the matrix, will sup as much aether from it as they can before it gets scrapped).

Beyond that, the GM always has contingency plans, but they're slow. It conserves as much as possible but rarely makes use of something twice as-is. The GM is a mind-bogglingly resilient system made up of resilient systems made up of fragile infrastructure.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Yeah, the GM is usually happy to scrap a plan if it gets foiled. It's going to try again when you're dead, after all, and maybe the stars are right again, in a few centuries.

FurtherReading
Sep 4, 2007

Thanks guys for the feedback for Dicecord last week. I've just released v1.01. You can grab it here.

Changelog is here.

Highlights:
- Added sass.

- The bot has a chance to add commentary when you get an exceptional success or 0 successes. You can edit this chance along with the possible messages in the personality settings of your character sheet. It will be saved as part of your character.xml.
- When making a new character it asks you choose a splat (only mage right now) and you can swap computers, drive and firearms to their dark era counterparts.

My next goal is to get a second splat added. Probably V:tR unless there seems to be a burning desire for something else.

Fantastic Alice
Jan 23, 2012





Further Reading posted:

Good stuff by good person.

You OK with this being spread around outside SA? Was thinking about going and making some tumblr post about it but for all I know you might want to wait till more is there first. Honestly this is a pretty great program and I can't wait till it can do Hunter to help streamline that.

FurtherReading
Sep 4, 2007

xanthan posted:

You OK with this being spread around outside SA? Was thinking about going and making some tumblr post about it but for all I know you might want to wait till more is there first. Honestly this is a pretty great program and I can't wait till it can do Hunter to help streamline that.

That would be great! I'm considering this version the "public" release so tell all your friends.

crime fighting hog
Jun 29, 2006

I only pray, Heaven knows when to lift you out
Everyone in my Hunter group pretty much has concepts finalized, I'm excited. One player gave me a pretty good plot hook I can play with:

One night in his auto-garage (he sleeps on a cot in the office) he heard a noise and thought someone was breaking in. He couldn't make out what the creature was but it was small enough to capture in a pillow case and he threw it into a footlocker, know kept in the basement. It's been months and the footlocker still rattles and something inside is wants out - and it talks, but he doesn't listen.

I need to read more Changling, this feels like some sort of creature from that, like a small fairy or something. I assume those exist in that setting?

Otherwise our first session is pretty much set with my players going up against John Carpenter's The Thing.

cptn_dr
Sep 7, 2011

Seven for beauty that blossoms and dies


It could definitely be a weird Goblin.

Basic Chunnel
Sep 21, 2010

Jesus! Jesus Christ! Say his name! Jesus! Jesus! Come down now!

cptn_dr posted:

It could definitely be a weird Goblin.

I ask that anyone intending to use my likeness in their game seek my permission

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

I've been trying to figure how to optimize a 15th Generation vampire for walking around during daytime, and I decided to have a look a Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom, from 2003, to see if it had detailed rules on how sunlight burns Vampires (because V20 is not very good here) and... gods, this book basically says that if you want to play an African vampire, gently caress you.

First, all African vampires start off at 14th Generation. Which would be an interesting concept in itself, but it means that your fun-options are more restricted when playing African vampires compared to other kindred. It also means you're automatically hosed over in a crossover campaign with regular Masquerade.

The real problem, though, is that African Vampires have two Humanity tracks instead of one; Aye and Orun. Aye is a straight-up copy of Humanity, while Orun measures your heavenly virtues, with sins being things like:

Orun 6: "failure to observe cultural traditions"
Orun 3:"ignoring the will of the gods, spirits, or ancestors"
Orun 2: "cooperation with a companies to despoil natural resources".

In short, it measures your stereotypical African-ness, and puts great restrictions on character agency because if you want high Orun, you need to always obey your Elders, the random whims of spirits, and traditions. And you will want a high Orun, because you can't roll more dice when using a Discipline than your Orun and you use Orun in place of Willpower to resist mind-influencing supernatural powers. To make matters worse, you can't have an Aye+Orun higher than 10+[Willpower dots in excess of 7], so no matter what you do, you'll either Frenzy a lot or roll pathetic dice pools for your Disciplines.

In short, it's a supplement for Masquerade that makes actually doing vampire things really difficult.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
Uhh.. using some transitive logic there that's saying that you're less human/moral the more traditionally African you are.

which...

:psyboom:

Basic Chunnel
Sep 21, 2010

Jesus! Jesus Christ! Say his name! Jesus! Jesus! Come down now!

Somebody explain the Strix / Vampire conflict in CoD to me

Oligopsony
May 17, 2007
Thanks for all the elliptonic podcast suggestions!

IMO any crossover theorizing is best put in the context of "I'm running a crossover chronicle with {gameline A} and {gameline B}, how do I make this work?" and relegating everything else to irrelevance.

Archonex posted:

I could see Father Wolf getting murked by the Exarch's though. Luna's a straight up facet of existence however. By the chart she'd be somewhere between an 8 or 9 in power on the ranking system for spirits in NWoD. Which puts her above even what most arch mages reach. And it's pretty clear that barring you taking the "nightmare" scenario option presented in the books that the Exarch's aren't the unbeatable super gods they try to present themselves as. Hell, in at least a few interpretations of their nature they're basically just a bunch of base, selfish, and ultimately petty inclinations left over from the people that broke the world trying to ascend to actual godhood.
Another probably obvious thing to do with the Exarchs is what was revealed about Control near the end of Ascension: they're an egregore of their putative servants; a collective superego that commands them to do what they secretly want anyway, but wouldn't feel comfortable doing unless they were ordered to.

Kellsterik
Mar 30, 2012
Strix are old-timey medieval folklore vampires that possess corpses and poison wells and stuff, Kindred are sexy Anne Rice vampires with tortured souls and superspeed. Strix hate Kindred because they're too human, that is, too sexy.

Dave Brookshaw
Jun 27, 2012

No Regrets

Basic Chunnel posted:

Somebody explain the Strix / Vampire conflict in CoD to me

Pretty much...

Kellsterik posted:

Strix are old-timey medieval folklore vampires that possess corpses and poison wells and stuff, Kindred are sexy Anne Rice vampires with tortured souls and superspeed. Strix hate Kindred because they're too human, that is, too sexy.

...This.

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.
Has post-GMC Changeling come out? I'm basically doing the whole "oh, big sale: might as well buy it while its cheap" thing.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Covok posted:

Has post-GMC Changeling come out? I'm basically doing the whole "oh, big sale: might as well buy it while its cheap" thing.

It's still in development, but David Hill was lead and with him gone, who knows what the timetable is.

Covok
May 27, 2013

Yet where is that woman now? Tell me, in what heave does she reside? None of them. Because no God bothered to listen or care. If that is what you think it means to be a God, then you and all your teachings are welcome to do as that poor women did. And vanish from these realms forever.

Kavak posted:

It's still in development, but David Hill was lead and with him gone, who knows what the timetable is.

Gotcha.

Oh, also, I heard Aberrant is a game where you think you're a superhero, but you're actually a Cronerberg monster. Anyone know more?

Chernobyl Peace Prize
May 7, 2007

Or later, later's fine.
But now would be good.

Covok posted:

Gotcha.

Oh, also, I heard Aberrant is a game where you think you're a superhero, but you're actually a Cronerberg monster. Anyone know more?
Aberrant's the second game, chronologically, in the Aeon cycle/series, with Adventure! and Aeon/Trinity coming before and after it, respectively. Aberrants ARE superheroes but the more you develop your powers/power stat, you accrue Taint, which slowly Cronenbergs you irreversibly.

What's left of the mutated Aberrants and their extra-mutated (and probably, extra-powerful) children a hundred years on have hosed off to the stars following a war with the strictly-psychic/psionic (so more telekinesis, less 'flying around being super strong') people that form the foundation of the protagonists in Aeon/Trinity.

Basic Chunnel
Sep 21, 2010

Jesus! Jesus Christ! Say his name! Jesus! Jesus! Come down now!

Whoops

Rand Brittain
Mar 25, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."
Has David Hill officially left? Or even unofficially left?

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
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2014-2018

He seemed pretty clear on wanting to distance himself from White Wolf as much as possible. He may have changed his mind on dropping out of OP writing projects but he said he was planning to on twitter when the poo poo hit the White Wolf fan.

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crime fighting hog
Jun 29, 2006

I only pray, Heaven knows when to lift you out

Kavak posted:

It's still in development, but David Hill was lead and with him gone, who knows what the timetable is.

Doesn't give me high hopes on HtVigil 2nd. Or is someone else in charge of that? I can't look at OPP's site at work :/

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